Translations

Monogatari’s interface — buttons, labels and messages — ships translated into many languages. For your own game you can add a language, override individual strings, or tweak the wording, all from your game’s JavaScript with no engine changes.

How UI strings work#

Every translatable piece of interface text has a key (e.g. Save, Settings, Loading). The engine looks up that key for the current language and shows the matching string. In markup, an element with data-string="Save" is filled with the translation of Save automatically — so the same interface works in every language.

Add or override strings#

Call monogatari.translation() with a language name and an object of key: value strings. It merges into that language, so you can override built-in strings or add new ones (handy for custom buttons and components):

// Override a built-in string and add a custom one (English)
monogatari.translation ('English', {
    'Quit': 'Exit',
    'Stats': 'Statistics'   // a custom key your own button/component uses
});

// Provide strings for a whole language
monogatari.translation ('Italiano', {
    'Save': 'Salva',
    'Load': 'Carica',
    'Settings': 'Impostazioni'
});

Then reference a custom key from your own markup with data-string:

<span data-string="Stats">Statistics</span>

Offering multiple languages#

To let players choose a language, enable multi-language mode and Monogatari shows a language-selection screen before the game starts:

monogatari.settings ({
    'MultiLanguage': true
});

See Internationalization for the full multi-language setup, including translating your story’s dialog.

See also#

• Internationalization — Multi-language games and the language-selection screen.
• Contributing Translations — Add a language to Monogatari itself.
• HTML Data Attributes — The data-string mechanism.